Symposium #3 - The Future of State and Local Opinion Research

Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop: 
Eighty Years of the Minnesota Poll
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Agenda

Friday, September 19, 2025
9:00am – 3:30pm
Coffman Memorial Union, President's Room
300 Washington Ave SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455

About the Speakers

Matt DeLong is an editor on the Minnesota Star Tribune's audience team. He oversees the Minnesota Poll, working with media partners to develop poll questionnaires and wrangling the resulting data to make it accessible for our reporters and readers. He also writes Nuggets, a free, weekly email newsletter about legal cannabis in Minnesota. He has written numerous reader-focused guides and FAQ articles on a wide range of topics.

Meagan Doll is a postdoctoral research associate in the Minnesota Journalism Center at the University of Minnesota. Meagan's research explores news production and consumption, with particular interest in how news media shape civic attitudes and behaviors, especially beyond Euro-American contexts, using both qualitative and quantitative methods—including content analyses, surveys, focus groups, experiments, and in-depth interviews. Meagan completed her Ph.D. and M.A. in Communication at the University of Washington and received her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication, with certificates in African studies and global health. 

Stephanie Edgerly is a Professor and Associate Dean of Research at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing at Northwestern University. Her research explores how features of new media alter the way audiences consume news and impact engagement. She is particularly interested in the mixing of news and entertainment content, how individuals and groups create and share news over social media, and how audiences selectively consume media. Recent projects have explored why people don't consume news and the varied ways that people make sense of the larger media environment.

Peter Enns is a Professor of Government and Professor of Public Policy at Cornell University and the Robert S. Harrison Director of the Cornell Center for Social Sciences. He is also Co-founder and Chief Data Scientist at Verasight. 

Mike Greenfield is a data scientist and entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. He was the first data scientist at PayPal and at LinkedIn and has founded four companies, including Change Research/Embold Research and Team Rankings. He currently serves as CEO of Change Research and President of the Greenfield Foundation. As a Trustee for the Greenfield Foundation Mike has worked with the team at Harvard's Shorenstein Center to build out the Goldsmith Awards Program since 2002; he is also a member of the Shorenstein Advisory Board. Mike and his team at Embold Research have worked closely with the team at Civic News and other media partners to create and build out the Civic News Information Census.

Jesse Holcomb is an Associate Professor of journalism and communication at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and was formerly an associate director of research at Pew Research Center. He has previously collaborated around local news research with the Institute for Nonprofit News and the Knight Foundation, and is currently the working group lead for audience research for the Local News Impact Consortium. 

Kang-Xing (“KX”) Jin is a board member of the Civic News Company and Rebuild Local News and on the advisory board for Stanford’s Center for Digital health. From 2006-2023 he worked at Meta; he managed the Ads engineering team from 2007 through the IPO and later was a VP with responsibility for many of Facebook’s products. In 2018, he shifted his professional focus to social impact. As Head of Health, his team helped organizations use Meta’s platforms to improve access to information, support and services. In this capacity, his team worked on the COVID Trends and Impact Survey, one of the largest-scale public health surveys conducted and the recipient of the 2022 AAPOR Policy Impact and Warren J. Mitofsky Innovators Awards.

Brad Jones is the chief methodologist for the Scientific Research Group at YouGov. He consults on research design and questionnaire development for academic, government, nonprofit and corporate clients. Jones holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in political science. Prior to joining YouGov, he worked for Meta generating insights about users’ needs and expectations connected to transparency and control of the advertising delivery system. While at Meta, Jones worked with a wide range of product teams and researchers across Meta’s various platforms. Before working for Meta, he spent the first part of his career at Pew Research Center working with the U.S. Politics and Public Policy team. During his time at Pew, Jones gained extensive experience working through every stage of the survey research process from questionnaire development, to project management, analysis and reporting. He earned his B.A. in Political Science from Brigham Young University.

David Lazer is a University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer Sciences, Northeastern University, and Co-Director, NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science. Lazer also leads the Civic Health and Institutions Project known as CHIP50. Prior to coming to Northeastern University, he was on the faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School (1998-2009). In 2019, he was elected a fellow to the National Academy of Public Administration. 

Michael Lipka is an associate director of research at Pew Research Center, where he studies Americans’ experiences with news and information. Over more than a decade at the Center, he has been a part of several major projects related to the information environment, including surveys on how Americans consume local news and election news. Michael also spent several years writing about trends in religion in the U.S. and globally, contributing to dozens of reports and short reads on various topics. He has a degree in journalism from Boston University and started his career as a sportswriter for The Boston Globe and the Associated Press.

Jens Manuel Krogstad Jens Manuel Krogstad is co-founder of Lumaris Research. He previously studied Latino public opinion and demographic trends at Pew Research Center. Prior to that, Krogstad spent nine years as a reporter at newspapers such as The Des Moines Register and USA Today. He is a graduate of the University of Minnesota. 

Susan Sherr is Executive Vice President for Demographic and Policy Research at SSRS and a graduate of Brandeis University and The Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where she received her Doctorate in 2000. Susan oversees the SSRS portfolio of Health Interview Research, including the University of Minnesota’s Minnesota Health Access Survey (MNHAS).

Andrew Trexler is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Andrew specializes in political communication, political behavior, and public opinion, with a focus on the United States. His primary research agenda uses experimental, computational, and survey methods to understand how the public seeks, encounters, processes, and employs political information in a challenging contemporary media environment.

Mark Watts is vice president of Client Services for AmeriSpeak and oversees the team that fields hundreds of research projects using NORC's AmeriSpeak Panel and other panels. In addition, Mark is a go-to AmeriSpeak resource for providing clients with guidance for their sample, weighting, and questionnaire designs. Major projects that he has contributed to include AP VoteCast, Facebook Election Research Project, America in One Room, National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) Research and Development Surveys, and much more. Mark received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Minnesota. 

Josef Woldense is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American & African Studies and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. His research interests are in the areas of elite politics, authoritarian regimes, political institutions and social network analysis with a geographical focus on Africa.